Dead Weight

by Steven F Havill

  “Yes, sir.”

  I held up both hands. “Well, then. Someone with a simple dime store scanner knows your habits. What happens if someone actually investigates? Let’s say there’s a complaint made that at twenty-oh-five hours on a Tuesday you stopped a motorist on 56 and put the arm on them. The obvious thing to do is look at the dispatch log and see if you’re working that area. Sure enough, you are. You’re not dumb enough to log the vehicle that you stop for a little easy cash, but maybe the log will show that ten minutes before you stopped another vehicle…maybe just a tourist headed for Arizona.”

  “But there’s no direct proof,” Pasquale said.

  “No, there’s not. But the evidence shows that you’re in the area, and what happens? There’s some credence given to the rumor in people’s minds.” I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter if it can be proved or not. The idea is planted.”

  “Christ,” the young deputy muttered.

  “We’ve got a little ammunition,” I said. “We can guess that someone listens to our radio traffic. And it’s somebody who’s reasonably familiar with the county and the way traffic works. If the lab gets back to me with something interesting from the original letters, that’s another piece.”

  Thomas Pasquale took a deep breath and held it for a long moment, finally exhaling with a loud sigh. “I hate this, sir,” he said.

  “I don’t blame you. What I want you to do is start thinking and researching. I’ve looked over the logs, and I don’t see any consistency in the vehicles that you’re stopping, except out-of-staters lead the pack, with the greatest share going to Texas plates.” I shrugged. “That’s reasonable. Now I want to know who you see when you’re out and around. Don’t change your patrol habits. Stay heavy on 56 when you can, and stay on the air.”

  “Do you think somebody else is hitting up on Mexican nationals and blaming it on me?”

  “It’s possible, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. Why not just keep it quiet? None of the Mexicans are going to say anything…Hell, it’s a way of life for most of them when it comes to government officials. Why bother drawing attention to the scam with a bunch of dumb letters?”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Just keep your eyes open. I’ll talk to Bob Torrez about it and see what he thinks. And if you happen to see me parked off in the weeds when you’re down that way, pretend I’m not there.”

  Deputy Pasquale gathered his hat and stood up. He was half a head taller than me and with the worry on his face no longer looked as if he were a twenty-year-old. “I guess I should ask, then,” he said.

  “Ask what?”

  “Two nights ago, down on 56. You were parked up on the mesa? You’d already received one or two of those letters?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought there was something to them, sir?”

  “I didn’t know what to think.” I reached out and gave him a paternal pat on the arm. “And when that happens, I go out and park in the dark somewhere, roll down the windows, and let great thoughts come to me.” I didn’t know if that answer satisfied him or not, but he nodded and settled the summer-weight uniform hat firmly on his head, the broad brim two fingers above the bridge of his nose.

  “Keep your eyes and ears open,” I said as he headed toward the door of my office.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, and touched the brim of his hat. He opened the door, and at the same time a muffled drumroll of summer thunder murmured off to the west.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The late afternoon storm, carrying the first promise of precipitation in more than a month, hung dark and broody over the western half of the county. I followed Deputy Pasquale outside, and we stood for a moment on the back steps of the Public Safety Building. The San Cristobal Mountains were obscured by long fingers of rain that curtained from ragged, torn scud clouds, while thunderheads built enormous billowing ranges whose tops anvilled out into wisps of ice.

  A rich, prolonged rumble, like something from the gut of a colossal horse who’d eaten moldy hay, rolled across the prairie.

  “The crazies are going to be out,” Pasquale said. He hefted his briefcase. “A change in the weather is all the excuse they need.” He grinned at me, the sort of expression that you paste on when you don’t want others to know how rotten the world makes you feel. In no mood for small talk, the deputy turned and started down the steps.

  “Don’t worry about the letters,” I said as he set off across the parking lot toward the gas pumps where 303, one of the department Broncos, was parked.

  “That’s going to be hard, sir,” Pasquale said over his shoulder.

  “Yes, it is,” I muttered, and went back inside.

  It was going to be a good evening to worry about a whole list of things. The lightning show out on the prairie might torch a grass fire. The resulting smoke could drift across the four lanes of the interstate, sending folks who didn’t understand the function of the brake pedal into a colossal domino game of twisted metal. The rain might hang up there, never touching the ground, taunting us. And that was just the weather.

  As I walked back into my office, I added to the worry list. Our resident heroic protector of the public trust might crawl out from under his rock and send another cute note to someone—this time, since there hadn’t been any public reaction that I’d heard, to a blabbermouth who would get the job done.

  And, most important, almost twenty-four hours had passed since a tractor tire served as a blunt instrument to crush Jim Sisson to death. We were no closer to knowing what had happened in that backyard.

  I knew that the deputies were scouring MacArthur Avenue for any tidbit and that gradually Undersheriff Robert Torrez would put together a profile of what the neighborhood had looked like on Tuesday night.

  My worry was that we probably knew that profile already. I had that nasty gut feeling that no one was going to jump out of the woodwork and say, Now let me tell you what I saw. I saw a 1989 yellow Mercury parked in front of the Sisson home, New Mexico license XYZ. I recognized one of the men who got out of it. He walked around behind the Sisson home, sure enough just about nine o’clock. I heard a heated argument, some machinery running, and then I saw him come running out a few minutes later and speed off.

  The longer I sat behind my desk staring at the blotter, the more skeptical I became. After a moment, I pulled a piece of paper out of the top right-hand drawer, picked up a pencil, and doodled a crude map. I was a rotten artist, but the map helped me focus my worries.

  To the best of our knowledge, four people had been inside the Sisson home that Tuesday evening—Mom and three teenagers—while Daddy vented his frustration on a deflated front-loader tire out back.

  Yes, the family inside the house could all have been absorbed with telephone gossip, video games, or raiding the fridge—whatever passed for evening activity in the Sisson household when Mom and Dad weren’t throwing things at each other. They might have been so absorbed that they didn’t hear an argument outside. Or they might have been arguing among themselves, that continuous nitpicking that scrubbed the nerve endings raw.

  Outside, the gentle pulsing idle of the diesel backhoe could have blanketed any but the most strident sounds. Someone might have come in the driveway unbeknownst to the folks inside the house. Even if they heard the crunch of tires on the driveway gravel, they might not have cared one way or the other who the visitor was. Or the killer might have parked out at the curb, or down the street, or in the Burger Heaven parking lot, or in the back alley and sauntered through the back gate.

  The opportunities for someone to slip in, murder Jim Sisson, and then slip out again, all unseen, were legion. The backhoe was the stumbling block. Jim Sisson wouldn’t have crouched patiently while the killer fumbled with the machine’s control levers. Whoever had killed the plumber would have had to immobilize him first, and a stout whack on the head would have done the trick—not that we’d find evidence of that, since the massive tire and rim had done a complete
job of erasing any trace of a previous head wound.

  The killer had to be someone who recognized the opportunity for a cover-up when it presented itself, coupled with a basic working knowledge of how to operate a backhoe. If we had a list of suspects, those two key factors would shorten it considerably.

  What bothered me was that Jim and Grace Sisson had been at each other’s throats all day—enough that neighbors had called in an official referee on three separate occasions to mediate. Why they were arguing no one seemed to know, and the Sissons never went public, even to the deputy.

  I found it hard to believe that everyone suddenly, as the dusk of evening fell after a day from hell, returned to knitting or reading or the tube, conveniently unconscious of the comings and goings of their day-long adversary. Any compilation of crime statistics that I had ever bothered to read said that most homicides in the home were the handiwork of people well known to the victim. Family members led the list.

  It didn’t make sense that after a day of fascinating violence between husband and wife, someone else would slide in and whack Jim Sisson because of an unpaid bill or a copper pipe joint that still leaked.

  I tossed the pencil down, crumpled up my doodled creation, and threw it toward the trash can. The shot missed, but I felt better. Knowing what I wanted to do prompted me out of my chair. In the outer office, life had come to a standstill. Ernie Wheeler sat in front of the dispatch console with his hands clasped in his lap, staring at the big chrome-plated microphone in front of him, trying to will it to squawk.

  “Where’s Linda?” I asked, and Ernie started. “Sorry,” I added.

  “I guess I was daydreaming,” Wheeler said. “Linda went home, I think. She was downstairs for a while, but I think she left. You want me to call her in here?”

  I waved a hand. “That’s all right. I’ll swing by.”

  Sure enough, Linda’s Honda was parked at the curb on Third Street. I pulled 310 in behind it and left it idling when I got out. The front door of the house was open, ready to let in any cool breeze that the storm to the west might care to generate. I stopped in front of the screen door, noticing the long tear in the screen where something had snagged it—probably the handlebars of the Harley when Tom Pasquale wheeled the motorcycle inside.

  Voices next door prompted me to turn my head, and I saw a kid about ten years old standing on the neighbor’s front step, eyeing me with interest. Someone inside the house said something in rapid-fire Spanish, and the kid lifted a hand to me in greeting before ducking back inside.

  “Knock, knock,” I called through the screen, and rapped on the frame at the same time, the thin aluminum rattling against the jamb.

  “Just a second!” Linda’s voice floated out from somewhere inside. In a moment, she appeared, towel in hand, short black hair wild. “I smelled like basement,” she said. “Come on in, sir.”

  “You spend much more time down in that darkroom, you’ll turn into a mushroom,” I said as I opened the screen door gently. The flimsy thing flexed on its hinges. Linda gave her hair a final drubbing with the towel and then ran her fingers through it to restore order. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with “Property of the University of New Mexico Athletic Department” across the chest.

  The little house was uncomfortably warm. With lousy insulation and cinder block construction, it was one of those places that would be cooled off nicely just about the time the sun rose…and by noon would be sweltering again.

  I glanced into the tiny living room, and my first impression was of a welter of magazines on every flat surface. Beside one ratty chair was a pile of books, with one of them spread-eagled open across the arm of the chair.

  “It’s a mess,” Linda said when she saw my glance.

  If I had to clean a house, it would be in far worse shape, but I didn’t comment. “I stopped by to ask you if you can break away for a bit to make a quick run to Las Cruces.”

  Linda stopped messing with her hair and looked at me, towel poised. “Cruces? Sure. When?”

  “Right now. I want to talk with Grace Sisson, and it’d help if you went along.”

  She nodded. “Let me change real quick.”

  “What you’re wearing is fine, if you’ve got a pair of shoes to go with it.”

  Linda grinned, the smile a little lopsided but fetching nevertheless. “I’ve got shoes. But I’d rather put on something a little more,…” she pulled at her T-shirt, “a little more something than this. It’ll only take a minute.”

  She disappeared into the back of the house, and I wandered into the living room. The book on the arm of the chair was Fulton’s A History of Forensic Science, and being flopped over the furniture wasn’t helping the old volume’s spine any. I picked it up and saw that whoever was reading it was about to embark on chapter 7, a discussion of Daguerre’s photography. A sample of his work, the familiar “mug shot” that was used for the first time as evidence in an 1843 trial, stared off the page. The suspect looked as if he had been forced to hold his breath for about a minute too long.

  “Interesting stuff,” I said when I heard Linda enter the room behind me.

  “Tom’s forcing himself to read that,” she replied, and I glanced up at her. She had kept the jeans but donned a plain white blouse and a pair of running shoes.

  “Forcing himself?” There was a mailer card from a magazine on the table, and I used it as a bookmark, closing the old volume carefully.

  “Well,” Linda said with a smile, “that’s not how he’d describe it, but I get the impression that reading wasn’t one of his strong suits in school. He works pretty hard at it.”

  “A little at a time,” I said, and placed the book on the table. “You ready to go?”

  She nodded, and we went back out into the blast furnace of the afternoon. The storm hadn’t made much progress across the prairie and was still parked twenty miles west of the village. The sun peeked out beside one thunderhead, washing the cloud fringes in light.

  Interstate 10 put the sun to our backs as we headed toward Las Cruces, and for the first five minutes or so we rode in comfortable silence—comfortable for me, anyway. As we flashed by a sign that promised DEMING, 12, she asked, “Have you heard anything from Estelle?”

  “I keep meaning to call her,” I said. “The house is off the market, whatever that means.”

  That was the prompting Linda needed, and for the next hour or so she chatted about this and that, a sort of bubbling overflow of information, most of which either I didn’t hear or didn’t require a response beyond an interested grunt.

  As we started down the long hill west of Las Cruces, she asked, after spending five minutes talking about her mother’s keen desire to run her daughter’s life, “Do you think Tom is involved in anything?”

  We were in the process of passing an oil tank truck at the moment, and I didn’t answer until we’d pushed through the rig’s bow wave and drifted back into the right lane.

  “What do you mean by that?” I replied, knowing damn well exactly what she meant.

  “He told me about the letters you received.”

  I looked at her sharply. “When was this?”

  “The letters, you mean?”

  “No…When did he tell you?”

  “This afternoon. In fact, it was just a few minutes before you came over.”

  “He didn’t waste any time,” I said, more to myself than to Linda Real.

  “He said that he didn’t want me finding out from someone else,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and sighed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t figure it out. The son of a bitch who’s writing the notes obviously thinks that he’ll accomplish something—damned if I know what.”

  “Tom said that you hadn’t actually gotten one directly.”

  “That’s right. Two county commissioners and a newspaper publisher passed them along.” I glanced over at her again. “I’m trusting you in this, Linda,” I said.

  “Sir?”

  “You n
eed to understand that whoever is writing those damned notes has a reason. It’s not just a joke. You’re an intelligent young woman, and you can figure out the possibilities just as well as I can. There’s the possibility that the note writer was fed what he believes to be reliable information. That means someone else is in on it, too. Or there’s the possibility that whoever is sending those notes just wants to make life hard for the department during an election year and picked Tom as an easy target. I’m sure you can add to the list of creative possibilities.”

  Linda gazed out the passenger side window in silence for a moment, then turned back and regarded me. “What makes you think that Tom isn’t involved, sir?”

  “I don’t remember saying that I thought that.”

  “I guess I’m hoping,” she said. “Tom got that impression from what you said to him.”

  “Well, then he’s right. For two reasons. First is intuition, which I freely admit in my case isn’t much to go on. But, for instance, my intuition tells me that I can trust you.” I shrugged and smiled at Linda. “I’ve known you for a while, through some trying circumstances. I’ve watched you work, as the saying goes. The same is true for Thomas Pasquale.” I chuckled at a sudden memory, and Linda looked puzzled.

  “I’m sure he told you of his most famous stunt, when he flipped his village patrol car in the middle of the Twelfth Street intersection with Bustos. Before an audience, so to speak. What I remember most about that incident is that he never tried to make an excuse. He never tried to make the accident appear to be anything other than what it was—a young hot-rodder going altogether too fast in the wrong place.”

  I slowed 310 as we started the endless ramp that took us from Interstate 10 to Interstate 25 northbound. “It’s little things like that. They tend to collect over the years.”

  “You said there were two reasons, sir.”

  “The second is simpler. If Thomas Pasquale actually was putting the arm on traffic stops for some quick cash and an honest citizen found out about it and had proof, I find it hard to believe that the logical response would be to write little anonymous notes to politicians. The logical thing would be to give me a call. Or the district attorney. Or Judge Hobart. Or even the state police or the attorney general.”